


it feels good (to be alone with you)

by violentdarlings



Category: Throne of Glass Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Actually not quite shippy yet but heading in that direction, Angst, F/M, Gen, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 06:21:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4818395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rowan has not quite been coping for a long time. Celaena helps. Heir of Fire era.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it feels good (to be alone with you)

**Author's Note:**

> Holy God this is the best series ever.

_Honey, when you kill the lights,_

_And kiss my eyes,_

_I feel like a person for a moment of my life._

 Hozier, _To Be Alone_

 

Rowan has been in love. He knows the heft of it, the weight, knows it as well as one of his exquisitely cared for weapons. Knows it can cut just as deeply and with the same violent precision. Knows that it as irrevocable as death and as terrible as waking without the sleeping presence of Lyria beside him, and knows that love lasts, horribly, beyond both of these things, and for that matter beyond all else.

This is not love, whatever he has with the heir to the throne to Terrasen. A broken throne, and a ruler to match it, as ruined and dangerous as the land she comes from, the very embodiment of disaster and despair. Mortals, Rowan would sneer, his lip curling, except for the small matter of the envy that rises up in him like a flood breaking the banks of a hapless river. Mortals. Their lives are so short, their torments so transient. They do not have to exist on and on into the bleakness of an eternal twilight, robbed of the only things that could stay the darkness.

Celaena lies beside him in the night, human and frail, the sharp wickedness of her Fae form banished, at least for now. The trust of her, to fall asleep beside him, her throat bare and beating, and the fool of him, to have allowed her to come so close in the first place.

She is not the only one to slumber. Rowan does so as well, and with a strange sense of comfort, one that sets him at war within himself. For the first time in so long, there is the soft sound of someone else’s breathing to break the silence. There is the soft rustle of her blanket as she twitches in her sleep, an assassin but also a girl of nineteen, who has seen too much. He is not alone. And that fact tears into him like an arrow; a tiny wound that nevertheless causes a disproportionate amount of pain. Rowan does not deserve the blunting of his grief. He does not deserve whatever comfort he can glean amongst the still hours between evening and dawn, when the world shrinks and falls away and he is left alone with Celaena into the night.

And in the day? Ah, the day. She is his student. She is a comrade and a thorn pricking ever at his side. She is beautiful and foolish and impulsive and destructive. Rowan has never known anyone like her. He is not sure he would like to know anyone like her every again. One Celaena – one _Aelin_ – is more than enough for the world to be getting on with. He sees her make progress inch by painstaking inch, sees her doubt herself and worry and rue the past, sees the depth of her hatred like an abyss from which there is no salvation from the darkness.

Rowan sees so much of himself in the heir of Terrasen, it would frighten him, if he were not convinced he is steel to the core. That the ancient vein of cursed weakness has been torn out of him with blade and hook and claw and the sharp surety of his purpose. That every time he had submitted to Maeve’s whips, it had bled away a little more of the creature that Lyria had loved. It would terrify him, if there was anything left to be afraid.

Rowan wakes one night with his heart in his throat and his body seeking her. Lyria, alive and warm and beating, tangled with him in the sheets of their bed. She’d had her head on his shoulder and her hand knotted over his on the swell of her belly, murmuring words of which he took very little notice, confident in his foolish youth that he would have forever to listen. In the dream, contrary to life, he’d been acutely aware she was with child; she’d been telling him names she thought appropriate. Rowan hadn’t felt the need to interject. Why would he, when they had centuries to look forward to together? It is not the dream that is the cruelty, but the waking.

It’s been so long since he dreamed of her. Decades, at the very least; he’d locked her away somewhere dark and deep and only thought of her when he absolutely needed to, when he was prepared for it, when his rage would fill him up and give him strength. This vision, unasked for and unexpected, and the tenderness of it, the way he’d been as gentle as a kitten under her hands, a predator tamed by love.

It is unbearable.

Rowan rolls onto his back, folds his arms across his chest, and stares at the ceiling, willing his heart to slow, his body to relax, for sleep to be nepenthe, for Celaena to not _bloody_ wake up.

“Rowan?” she asks, and he curses. Of course. She is the perpetual pain in his ass.

“Go back to sleep,” he grumbles. The memory of Lyria’s voice rings in his ears. _Dear heart –_ he crushes it within his breast, silences her voice echoing up from centuries lost. He is certain, at this point, that she would not even recognise him if by some miracle she was returned. It is a very good thing that he will be delivered directly to whatever dark torment awaits killers and oath-breakers at the end of their lives. He could not bear to see her, however fleetingly, in the gardens of the next world, and see the horror at the thing he has become, the ruin he has made of the heart she had so loved.

“Stop brooding,” Celaena snaps in the darkness – of course, being as he is, he can see her clearly. Rowan manages a smile that is not a smile; a baring of the teeth, a grimace attempting a vain masquerade as something bright.

“Is there not an idiom about the comparative colour of kitchenware amongst humans?” he asks tartly. “I believe that is appropriate.”

“Hilarious,” Celaena replies, but she was not Adarlan’s Assassin for nothing; she hears something in his voice, some trace perhaps of the torment he knows lurks just under her skin. “Bad dream or good dream?” she asks, just idly enough that he could pretend to have fallen back asleep and she would not press him. But he has peeled away enough of Celaena’s layers – no, that is not it. Rather, she has _shown_ him enough of herself that to not reply would be churlish.

“Good dream,” he says, succinct and bitten off. It does not invite a reply. Yet Celaena would not be Celaena if she could resist poking at scars, her own very much included.

“Those are the worst,” she says lightly. Too lightly. Rowan turns his head as Celaena inches herself closer, suddenly within arm’s reach, if only he could unbend the rictus of his pride long enough to reach for her.

“What are you doing?” he snaps, but there’s no real heat in it. Celaena rolls her eyes and slaps him on the chest – not softly, either.

“Be quiet,” she tells him, not without kindness. In ordinary circumstances he would not countenance the order, not from her, but he does not protest. Delicately, and with something like gentleness, Celaena kisses his forehead, as platonic as a sister and as warm as the mother he can barely remember. Rowan feels himself tense, taut as a bowstring; the touch is unfamiliar and something forgotten, like a scrap of himself buried deep where he could not take it out and taint it. He wants her to stop. He wants her to never stop. He wants Lyria and the babe and the life they should have had together. He wants.

Celaena, receiving no condemnation, does not stop. She traces the sweeps and whorls of his tattoo with her lips, gives the same attention to his other cheek. She does not kiss him on the mouth, and he is relieved. He does not love her, after all. Somehow, though later he will not remember how, his arm comes up to press her against him, to revel in the simple contact with another living being.

Celaena feathers butterfly kisses to his eyelids, his cheeks, both benediction and grace. Rowan had not known she had tenderness within her as well as the lethality she wields like a weapon. But somehow, he is not surprised. He knows she will not cast this up to him in the brightness of the morning, will not rake his tender areas over the coals that burn inside her, now, all of the time. It is not the first time Celaena has shown him mercy, and he suspects it will not be the last.

Rowan tucks her a little more securely into his side, and allows himself to be weak.


End file.
